How do you feel about the typing indicator —“David is typing”— that appears on your buddy’s screen while you’re composing a message in chat? Does it make you feel self-conscious? Do you feel paranoid? If so, you have me to blame, because I was one of the people who invented the damn thing. But I can explain everything...

[Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web] revealed the thing about Web use today that surprises him most: kittens. Yes, the Web’s obsession with cats - be they grumpy, heart-meltingly adorable or musically inclined - has astounded the man who helped make it all possible.

[F]or the 25,000 or so active abalone hunters in California, this ugly sea snail, with the meaty texture of steak and the delicate flavor of calamari, is an unsurpassed luxury. And the punishment and perils of the hunt are more than a cheap adrenaline rush. For them abalone is a taste worth dying for.

[O]pponents of single-sex education argue that separating children by gender is not only sexist, it also leads to harmful gender stereotyping. They also state that the existing science does not show that same-sex education has tangible benefits and that public funding should not be used to support segregating students by gender...Yet interest in the potential promise of single-sex schooling continues to grow.

Hertz will happily rent you an Audi, (or a Porsche, for that matter). What they won’t do is prevent you from having to encounter the idea of a Hyundai — to pass one under the Gold canopy, for example, or to be seated next to normals on the courtesy bus who might later slum it in an Elantra...When Silvercar sells you car rental that “doesn’t suck,” they’re really selling you car rental that doesn’t involve ordinary people, that end arounds the inefficiencies of large-scale practice by buying out of it.

[The Wikimedia Foundation] argues that [photographer David] Slater doesn’t own the picture’s copyright because he didn’t take the picture—the monkey did. And since the monkey can’t own the rights, nobody does.

Our complicated relationship with clowns spans everything from the circus to the sex dungeon, from Saturday morning Bozo to Tim Curry peering up from the storm drain, from Patch Adams to Insane Clown Posse, not to mention the ubiquity of that flame-haired, greasepaint visage, the placidly smiling face of what is surely the 20th-century Ozymandias: Ronald McDonald. Every person I told about my plan to attend the clown convention voiced concern for my well-being.

- BuzzFeed pays a visit to the World Clown Association annual conference